New combat art system with two semi-placeholderish combat arts: circle cut and stun smash. I actually find them kind of fun to use. I'll try to add at least 3 more combat arts later to increase the count to 5, which is the number of different moves one can enable simultaneously. That should be enough for the next release.

Billboard-based censorship of breasts and stuff, complete with a neat pixelation effect if you have shaders enabled. This should be good enough for YouTube and such since the same approach seems to work for other games there. I particularly like the unintended consequence of the pixelation effect leaving more to your imagination while also making nudity feel more sinister at the same time.

As for future development, I got a long list of big features that I'd like to implement, but I'll probably end up postponing some of them since I can only do that much alone in one release cycle. In any case, expect to see some of these: random building generation, more dungeon elements, usable castle generation, better ore vein generation, random merchant NPCs, better particle systems, dismemberment, user interface improvements, ragdoll animations and animated clothes/hair/weapons.

Decapitation. No rolling heads yet, but the engine code to do that is there already. The system is actually quite flexible. It can create the meaty stuff to seal the gaps of the removed limbs, and it could be used for more generic dismemberment or object splitting tasks.

Rendering of particle animations created with Blender. This is quite significant since there's just no usable particle animation editor for Ogre itself. I found it bearable when I created simple particle effects for decapitation, blood, summoning and healing with it.

It's not really that impressive visually. The decapitation effect basically looks like the head just disappears while a couple of polygons and blurry particles appear. It's good enough for now, though, since it's technically sound, works in principle and could be improved relatively painlessly in the future. I'll think about polishing things once the basic feature set of the next release is done.

I'm not particularly thrilled about spending my precious development time on recording videos, but I might do it eventually if no one else with a semi-decent graphics card will. Not posting anything in over 2 years is just pathetic performance, but I'm still posting a screenshot instead.

A screenshot is good. I only encouraged a video because it sounded like an impressive feature. If you feel it still needs work, by all means don't spend your time recording videos of features you don't feel require it.

I always liked the Overgrowth alpha videos however. I think they are a good way to get interest in a game. You might consider that at some point, but of course they are trying to sell their game so it's a different kettle of fish.

Frankly, there hasn't been a whole lot of progress lately since I have been rather busy with playing games and real life.

I have also been somewhat out of ideas on how the gameplay should develop and how I should focus my efforts. Too many things to do and no clear idea on what would improve things have made development problematic. However, I have found some inspiration from other games and am getting the real life sorted out as well, so the development speed should be picking up.

By the way, historically, the development speed has always been really inconsistent. It's business as usual here, and development continues even after longer breaks.